When renowned film director Péter Gárdos wrote the story, he intended it as a film script, but eventually he made it into a novel. “Fever at Dawn,” the love story of two Holocaust survivors―the author’s parents―has ever since sold in more than 20 territories.

The long list of the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for 2008 has been announced. Péter Nádas' Own Death, an account of the writer's heart attack, with a hundred and sixty photos of one single tree taken by the author, is among the 137 books nominated by libraries the world over. – Zsófia Bán's review.

This year Peter Sherwood is celebrating his golden jubilee, fifty years of translating from Hungarian. To mark the occasion and to celebrate his work, here's the veteran linguist himself explaining how he ended up in such an odd vocation, as a literary diplomat.

"...the question was not whether it was going to be ice cream or chocolate, nor whether it was going to be raspberry syrup or peach nectar, not even whether it was going to be a Hungarian dance or a Romanian dance but the real question was always whether it would be peace or war."

Writers and poets were intensively spied upon in the forty years of the
Kádár era. After his book on agents on the rock music scene, Tamás
Szőnyei has written a monumental study on informers who specialized in
literary life.